Quote:
Originally Posted by getbak
The last three Best Director Oscars have been won by Hispanic and Asian directors. Last year, Alejandro González Iñárritu won for Birdman. The year before, Alfonso Cuarón won for Gravity. The year before that, Ang Lee won for Life of Pi.
Iñárritu has a good chance of repeating this year for The Revenant.
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And I think this is part of the issue: All of those directors (and they're all excellent directors) got their start in their own country, outside Hollywood, where there is a film industry specifically designed to help people like them grow as artists, and get exposure.
If the African American community was it's own country (not at all suggesting it should be! Just a hypothetical), it would probably produce more directors, writers, actors, and technical or creative professionals who go on to be successful in Hollywood, than the African American community as part of the US.
Looking specifically at acting; this is a skill that needs to be professionally developed, but Hollywood is more interested in giving roles to names that will sell tickets. So particularly with black actors, hip-hop personalities with little acting experience are given significant roles, because they will sell tickets. It's no coincidence that some of the most respected black dramatic actors today are from Britain, (Elba, Ejiofor, and probably John Boyega in the near future) where they're getting a stage acting background, and then moving from there to the screen. Which isn't to say that there aren't good black actors in the US who started out on stage (Don Cheadle, for example); but certainly it's not a direction that they are likely to be steered towards, and then there's going to be a significant barrier in moving from stage to screen that doesn't exist in other countries. It's ridiculous to think that if you're African American, you've probably got a better chance of becoming an a-list actor by becoming a hip-hop artist than by studying acting. And yes, getting into screen acting at a young age, like Michael B. Jordan, is another route, but there's a very limited number of roles for very young black actors, so it's not a realistic career path the way it might be for young white kids.
The problem isn't that Hollywood doesn't care about black culture. Well it doesn't, but it doesn't care about asian cultures, or latin culture, or even white culture, for that matter. It cares about making money. It's also very risk adverse, which means it is extremely slow to change from successful formulas. It will give important behind-the-camera jobs based on past experience (or occasionally, to people with the right connections), so to a large extent it lets other countries take the risk and expense and effort of developing directors and cinematographers, then hires them to Hollywood once they've proven their capabilities in their home market. (Cinematography is really where this is most evident. Only a handful of american cinematographers have been nominated for an Oscar in recent years.)
Whatever success African Americans have had in film lately in terms of writing and directing roles (Ava DuVernay, for example), has almost nothing to do with Hollywood and a lot to do with the Sundance Institute, which is the closest comparable in the US to a national filmmaking industry as it exists in other countries.